Now a "holy grail," sticker-sealed box was valued at just $2,000 to $4,000 in 2012.

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Last week, a copy of the first printing of Super Mario Bros. in pristine condition sold for just over $100,000. This week, the collector who sold that gem told Ars that he's been preparing for this moment for years.

Further Reading

The seller—who asked to remain anonymous to protect his privacy but goes by the handle Bronty online—told Ars he didn't even have an NES growing up. He just played games like Super Mario Bros. at a friend's house. But around 2002, at age 27, Bronty was gripped by a desire to once again play the NES games he hadn't thought about for well over a decade.

A quick trip to eBay got him his nostalgic gaming fix and sparked an interest in a new hobby that fewer people were paying attention to at the time. "Having already been a comic collector for many years, I had an interest in collecting in general," Bronty told Ars. "I started thinking, 'Would this be an interesting thing to collect?'"

"I started fairly early on, and back in 2002, sealed game prices were nothing like today," he continued. "Stuff that is worth 10, 15, 20 thousand dollars now was $200 to $400 then. The other people I was competing against... they were largely students maybe in fourth year university or something. I was a little older, 27, I had a bit of a job [in a financial field], so it was a little easier for me to afford."

By 2007, Bronty had amassed a near-complete collection of well over 600 NES games, all still sealed in their shrink wrap. And he said he knew he was well ahead of where the market would be. "I 100 percent just saw this as 'A' material. Not to this extent, but I saw this [increase in value] coming," Bronty said. "I knew that these were special items and that my window to buy was now. I spent everything I could, sold all my good comics, went into debt, I went all out."

Even with his all-in approach, Bronty's biggest single sealed-in-box find was still to come.

Finding the “holy grail”

By all rights, a sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros. should probably not even exist in such perfect condition more than three decades after it was first put on store shelves. When it comes to sealed games, the "great, great, great majority" come from unsold inventory found in stores that have closed, Bronty said. "There was one lot I found through eBay that had 3,000 sealed NES games," for instance.

Enlarge/ Even shrink-wrapped old games aren't often found in the pristine condition of this sealed Super Mario Bros.. These examples were found in an abandoned video rental store.

The problem with that kind of sourcing, though, is that "even in a lot that big, most of it is garbage... because it's unsold inventory," Bronty noted. "And what went unsold? The garbage titles [released] from '90 to '92, because that's when a lot of these closeouts happen. The stuff from '85, '86, '87, it sold the minute it hit the shelves."

That stuff includes the 17 "black box" games that were sold in extremely limited quantities as part of the NES' test market launch in New York and Los Angeles starting in late 1985. These "sticker-sealed" games, which were never protected by shrink wrap, were never going to sit unloved on store shelves for decades. "Something like this from the very, very beginning [of the NES' lifespan], it just doesn't happen," Bronty said. "The install base was still very small. The stock that went through the sales channels was very, very tiny."

Deniz Kahn, CEO and founder of game grading service Wata Games, estimates that only 2,000 to 10,000 copies of each matte-sticker-sealed test-market NES game were ever made. The vast majority were likely opened and played, and even those that weren't opened likely got dinged up over the years due to the lack of shrink wrap. Kahn estimates that only "single digit" numbers of each individual sticker-sealed title still exist unopened in 2019, and he has only heard hearsay about one other sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros. existing in beat-up condition.

So you can understand that Bronty was surprised to see a good-condition sticker-sealed copy of the original Mario Bros. (the NES version of the arcade game) pop up on eBay in late 2012. He acted. And after winning that auction (for about $8,000), Bronty discovered that the Wisconsin-based seller had over 100 other sticker-sealed and early shrink-wrapped NES games for sale.

Further Reading

It was this particular lot that just so happened to include a sticker-sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. that may well be one-of-a-kind.

The original seller told Bronty the bounty had come from his father, who had recently passed away and left these sealed boxes behind. Apparently, as the son tells it to Bronty, this late collector had been purchasing pretty much every major new video game since the late '70s on the day of release. "He started buying in the Atari days, he was opening and playing them at that time," Bronty said. "When it got to the titles that were later in his collection, they were all unopened; he had stopped playing."

Close up examples of the sticker seal that only appeared on games sold during the NES' test market launch.

"It took somebody doing something that made no sense for this copy [of Super Mario Bros.] to survive," Bronty continued. "A grown man buying video games and putting them on the shelf without playing them, that just didn't happen back then. They're like $50 each [in '80s money], to do a large collection of that, somebody would be spending thousands of dollars on something they're not going to use, which makes no sense. They weren't thought of in any way whatsoever as collectibles."

In most hobbies, Bronty said, when you see someone preserving new purchases like this before a secondary market has developed, "it's usually somebody who has more of a hoarder mindset than someone who's doing this as a collector out of foresight. It's obsessive behavior, a compulsion more than anything. But hey, it's amazing because for geeks like us 30 years later, it provides pristine examples we can enjoy."

Hidden in plain sight

After a bit of bargaining, Bronty and a fellow collector (who asked to go by the name "Kevin" for the sake of anonymity) partnered up to spend $50,000 to $60,000 on a total of 60 to 75 NES games that had been preserved in that single lot. But the box that would eventually become the first six-figure private video game sale wasn't even considered the jewel of the bunch at the time.

In making their collective offer, Kevin told Ars that the pair "individually considered each game and assigned what we thought was a fair value." Kevin and Bronty valued a few early NES rarities like Clu Clu Land, Kid Icarus, and Donkey Kong in the $5,000 to $6,000 range, Kevin said. The sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros., on the other hand, was worth "in the $2,000 to $4,000 range," by their estimation. "These were typical going rates for these games at the time, so we were careful not to underwhelm with our offer and risk not making a deal," Kevin said.

"We both knew [Super Mario Bros.] was special and it was definitely something we both saw as being very desirable and one of the best games in the lot, but it wasn't [considered] head and shoulders above everything else, no." Bronty told Ars. "Even then, Super Mario Bros. was very much recognized as being a special piece, just maybe not to this degree."

The sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros. in its original VGA case, where it stayed until a re-rating by Wata Games last year.

"Kevin"

The back of the box. Don't worry, that tape is closing a plastic bag outside the outer case.

"Kevin"

The sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros., as it was first shown to Bronty and Kevin in a dark, low-quality photo from the original seller.

"Kevin"

The sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros. sits next to a sticker-sealed Mario Bros. which the buyers actually valued much more highly in 2012.

"Kevin"

The sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros. sits with a few other pieces from the same lot, waiting for grading and authentication by the Video Game Authority.

"Kevin"

It wasn't just Nintendo-developed games in the lot. This shrink-wrapped copy of Mega Man was also quite rare and valuable.

"Kevin"

Back in 2012, it was more difficult to assess the true rarity and value of these early games, Bronty continued. "You have to keep in mind, when I started collecting... the amount that people understood about the chronology of the different variants was very, very little," Bronty said. "We all understood there were different [versions] and sort of knew a little bit about some of them being a little bit harder to find, but we had no idea about which ones came first and which ones came truly later... It's only through different bits of research by different people over the years that we started to understand this stuff."

Indeed, Wata Games Chief Grader Kenneth Thrower told Ars it took years of collective effort from the community to compile a definitive list of all the variant versions of Nintendo's first 30 "black box" NES games. Over time, collectors were able to cross-reference sealed boxes they had in their possession with lists of release dates provided by Nintendo. This allowed them to figure out when certain features started appearing and disappearing from the production line.

"Maybe the biggest smoking gun was that the last three [black box] games made in 1987 were the only ones that have never been found with sticker seals," Thrower said. Meanwhile, he added, "1985 releases are also the only titles to have Matte sticker seals (1st possible printing) while 1986 releases are only available in Gloss sticker and later (2nd possible printing). Nintendo's earlier Game & Watch handheld games were also sealed with this sticker seal, so it further fortifies the timeline."

But none of this was common knowledge in 2012, even among serious collectors. So when the time came to divide up the lot, Kevin said he prioritized personal favorites like Metroid, Donkey Kong Jr., Rygar, and Mega Man over the sticker-sealed Super Mario Bros.. "I knew [Mario] was valuable, but so were many of the first-round games we bought," Kevin said. "At the time, we didn't really consider the sticker seal all that much more valuable over a 'regular' sealed copy."

Reflecting on last week's sale, Kevin said he's "a bit surprised at the dollar value of the Super Mario Bros.... but I suspect I'll continue to be surprised more and more as time goes on." Looking back, Kevin still doesn't have any regrets about what he calls an amicable splitting of the sealed NES lot with Bronty.

"I'm very happy for [Bronty] to have gotten [Super Mario Bros.]," Kevin said. "He... was the one who got his foot in the door with the seller and orchestrated most of the deal. He deserves it! I was just along for the ride for the most part, [and] I ended up [with] several nice pieces myself, so no complaints here."

"When you are splitting things up at a point in time, you do your best as to what's fair then," Bronty added. "What's fair eight years later might not be the same."

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

66 Reader Comments

This was a great read. I’m not much into collectibles, but I do have a sealed original iPhone in my safe that I figure might become a collectible someday. Problem is, I didn’t give any thought about what would happen to the battery over time.

Looks like i have something else to keep an eye out for during garage/yard sale season. My other two has been comics (no real success there) and old watches, with watches, most people can't tell the difference between a $10 broken Timex and a $1000 broken Rolex that both are in a box of watches going for $20 a piece.

As a TCG collector who has moved quite a few high value collectibles in secondary markets that are comparable to these, I personally think right now is probably a good time (if not the best) to sell, at least from an analytical perspective. The reality is that right now we are living in a moment where the people who grew up during the late 80's to early 90's now have stable jobs and many of them are in their 40's which is precisely their peak earning years, making the secondary market of collectibles from that era extremely inflated with people who have lots of cash to spend. Maybe there will always be people who are interested in old stuff just like today there are still tons of people who collect old gramophones and pocket watches, but the market will eventually dwindle to a very small niche. We already saw signs of this cycle happening during the past decade with resurgence in vinyl record collecting, but today you no longer see such fervor in the market anymore, as the years pass and their demographic slowly "grows out" of it.

The 8/16-bit secondary market explosion will eventually give way to younger audiences who grew up with consoles like the PS2 and the Gamecube, the PSP and the GBA, and the cycle of inflation will repeat for that stuff too as their buyers sort of, uh, hit their midlife crisis and want to spend a ton of cash on something they have a sentimental link towards.

At these rates a "professional" could easily produce fakes. The only problem would be sourcing an original to copy..

The higher value an item is, the more scrutiny the buyer will put towards making sure it is a genuine product.

That's why the best items to fake aren't these one-of-a-kind, eye wateringly expensive products but rather sub-100 dollar items and are much easier to pass without people noticing, especially as part of a large lot. To give you an example, in Magic: The Gathering there's a very small chance a fake $1000 will be bought without the buyer noticing but rather most professional fakes are $20-$50 tournament staples that people would just assume they're genuine when viewed form across the table at a competitive event. No tournament organiser or judge has the time to search every single card from every player to make sure they're genuine.

As someone who has also amassed a sizable sealed video game collection over the years (150+ games over 15 systems), articles like these are super informative and somewhat of a bellwether to the current state of the market. I didn’t even know there was a competitor to VGA grading until now, which I’ll be looking into.

Although I don’t have any sealed black box titles like the aforementioned, I do have some complete series (Mega Man, Castlevania, etc.) still sealed in storage. Many games bought in the late 90s/early 2000s I intended on playing never got opened and are still sitting there. With life changes and responsibilities I’ve turned into a casual gamer these days so at this point I’ll probably never open those sealed games, and eventually sell them to collectors.

It almost seems like grading is required in order to ease concerns about authenticity as it’s likely easy to forge sealed games today. On the bright side, that small investment will provide boosted returns on completed sales.

Maybe there will always be people who are interested in old stuff just like today there are still tons of people who collect old gramophones and pocket watches, but the market will eventually dwindle to a very small niche. We already saw signs of this cycle happening during the past decade with resurgence in vinyl record collecting, but today you no longer see such fervor in the market anymore, as the years pass and their demographic slowly "grows out" of it.

You could be right, but I would think these people who want to scratch that nostalgia itch aren’t focused on buying sealed games to never open and play. I feel it’s more about preserving the legacy of this early technology, and there’s a subset of us who care deeply about that. With downloads and streaming taking over, physical media will likely become extinct at some point so these pristine copies will represent that particular era of gaming.

As a TCG collector who has moved quite a few high value collectibles in secondary markets that are comparable to these, I personally think right now is probably a good time (if not the best) to sell, at least from an analytical perspective. The reality is that right now we are living in a moment where the people who grew up during the late 80's to early 90's now have stable jobs and many of them are in their 40's which is precisely their peak earning years, making the secondary market of collectibles from that era extremely inflated with people who have lots of cash to spend. Maybe there will always be people who are interested in old stuff just like today there are still tons of people who collect old gramophones and pocket watches, but the market will eventually dwindle to a very small niche. We already saw signs of this cycle happening during the past decade with resurgence in vinyl record collecting, but today you no longer see such fervor in the market anymore, as the years pass and their demographic slowly "grows out" of it.

The 8/16-bit secondary market explosion will eventually give way to younger audiences who grew up with consoles like the PS2 and the Gamecube, the PSP and the GBA, and the cycle of inflation will repeat for that stuff too as their buyers sort of, uh, hit their midlife crisis and want to spend a ton of cash on something they have a sentimental link towards.

At these rates a "professional" could easily produce fakes. The only problem would be sourcing an original to copy..

The higher value an item is, the more scrutiny the buyer will put towards making sure it is a genuine product.

That's why the best items to fake aren't these one-of-a-kind, eye wateringly expensive products but rather sub-100 dollar items and are much easier to pass without people noticing, especially as part of a large lot. To give you an example, in Magic: The Gathering there's a very small chance a fake $1000 will be bought without the buyer noticing but rather most professional fakes are $20-$50 tournament staples that people would just assume they're genuine when viewed form across the table at a competitive event. No tournament organiser or judge has the time to search every single card from every player to make sure they're genuine.

Yep, just lower-denomination bills like $20 are easier to pass than fifties or hundreds, which are so annoying to deal with that they always get scrutiny.

Seeing a cartridge sealed in a box, makes me feel as sad as seeing a tiger in a cage.Videogames are meant to be played.

I know what you mean, and I find the whole idea of collecting anything mass market at this level to be kind of stupid, but this isn't a "cartridge in a box", it's an experimental release that hardly exists in the word anymore. Anything in the rare-to-unique range like this is going to attract some crazy collector or other, and they're free to spend their money on that if they want.

You can get the same game at any swap meet for a few dollars, and even if the ROM is a rare variant, undoubtedly someone has dumped it already so if you want to play it, by all means load up and go. This doesn't hurt you in the slightest.

I didn’t know that box art started as a large format image. I guess I always assumed it was just done at box scale.

The OG boxes like this Mario one that I recreated for the top art are interesting, because they were made with cut paper. I actually started with the original box art as I was making the intro image, and abandoned it because it was too much of a pain to work with since it isn't actually pixel accurate. All those hand cut lines vary in width if you look closely.

While I have come to realize that I actively dislike the collectible fetish - if I have something interesting, I want to be able to use it and share it with others, not hoard it - I have to admit that I've benefited from it in the past.

I got into Magic: The Gathering during its initial launch. I saw a lot of other people playing it at a local gaming convention, and immediately disliked the collectible aspect... but by the end of the convention, my curiosity had gotten the best of me, and I paid double the MSRP for a starter set. The collectible aspect aside, I mostly enjoyed it, and spent a great deal of my spare cash on it over the next few months.

Fast forward to a year or so later, around Revised or 4th Edition, and I was in a money crunch for rent, food, etc. I had seven of the "Power Nine" cards, though, and I went to another convention with the intent to sell them. The seven pieces of cardboard earned me several hundred dollars... which I unfortunately needed immediately, when one of my car's axles broke on the way home.

I often point out that seven little pieces of cardboard replaced my car's axle, when people talk about doing strange things with collectible cards.

I didn’t know that box art started as a large format image. I guess I always assumed it was just done at box scale.

The OG boxes like this Mario one that I recreated for the top art are interesting, because they were made with cut paper. I actually started with the original box art as I was making the intro image, and abandoned it because it was too much of a pain to work with since it isn't actually pixel accurate. All those hand cut lines vary in width if you look closely.

Yeah, I wanted to say good job on the article image. At first, I thought it was just a shot of the box art, only I was wondering why I'd never noticed the dollar signs before. Then it hit me, and I looked for your name and found it.

At these rates a "professional" could easily produce fakes. The only problem would be sourcing an original to copy..

The higher value an item is, the more scrutiny the buyer will put towards making sure it is a genuine product.

That's why the best items to fake aren't these one-of-a-kind, eye wateringly expensive products but rather sub-100 dollar items and are much easier to pass without people noticing, especially as part of a large lot. To give you an example, in Magic: The Gathering there's a very small chance a fake $1000 will be bought without the buyer noticing but rather most professional fakes are $20-$50 tournament staples that people would just assume they're genuine when viewed form across the table at a competitive event. No tournament organiser or judge has the time to search every single card from every player to make sure they're genuine.

According to a bunch of Facebook posts from my local retro gaming store, there is apparently a huge problem with counterfeit retro video games on eBay currently. It's not the hugely expensive titles, it's the common $5-20 titles. Makes sense, as you're not too likely to look that closely at an inexpensive game, but you'll pore over an expensive one, just like you've said above about Magic cards. Apparently there are some tell-tale things to look out for, to identify a counterfeit, but I'm sure the counterfeiters will get better over time. Apparently the counterfeits still play fine, which makes them not worthless, but way reduces their resale value.

Sometimes fakes are obvious though, as when there's just too little wear based on the age of the item. My father-in-law was an avid coin collector, and when he passed away my mother-in-law was gathering together his collection to sell. She showed me one of his "prize" items, a silver dollar, that was supposedly over a hundred years old. But the lines just looked way too sharp to me, for something that was supposedly so old, and not a sealed mint or near-mint, but something that had supposedly been in circulation.

Sure enough, when she got the lot evaluated by a reputable dealer (recommended by a family friend and collector as a reputable honest dealer), it turned out to be a counterfeit. Father-in-law had paid I think a couple hundred dollars for it, too, and it was worthless. Luckily the rest of the collection was real, and it brought in a nice bit of money for my mother-in-law.

As someone who has also amassed a sizable sealed video game collection over the years (150+ games over 15 systems), articles like these are super informative and somewhat of a bellwether to the current state of the market. I didn’t even know there was a competitor to VGA grading until now, which I’ll be looking into.

Although I don’t have any sealed black box titles like the aforementioned, I do have some complete series (Mega Man, Castlevania, etc.) still sealed in storage. Many games bought in the late 90s/early 2000s I intended on playing never got opened and are still sitting there. With life changes and responsibilities I’ve turned into a casual gamer these days so at this point I’ll probably never open those sealed games, and eventually sell them to collectors.

It almost seems like grading is required in order to ease concerns about authenticity as it’s likely easy to forge sealed games today. On the bright side, that small investment will provide boosted returns on completed sales.

Maybe there will always be people who are interested in old stuff just like today there are still tons of people who collect old gramophones and pocket watches, but the market will eventually dwindle to a very small niche. We already saw signs of this cycle happening during the past decade with resurgence in vinyl record collecting, but today you no longer see such fervor in the market anymore, as the years pass and their demographic slowly "grows out" of it.

You could be right, but I would think these people who want to scratch that nostalgia itch aren’t focused on buying sealed games to never open and play. I feel it’s more about preserving the legacy of this early technology, and there’s a subset of us who care deeply about that. With downloads and streaming taking over, physical media will likely become extinct at some point so these pristine copies will represent that particular era of gaming.

Personally, I collect retro games and consoles first to play, second to collect. Generally I'll buy a game I want to play, while passing up games I'm not interested in playing - but the older a game is, the more likely I'll check the current selling price on pricecharting.com first before passing it up. Hopefully my collection will be worth some money some day, but I'm definitely not doing it as an investment, more because I really enjoy doing it, and enjoy displaying it in my office/man cave.

My wife and I love garage sales and thrift stores, and I'll always first check out the video games and electronics sections first. Thrift stores have started to wise up to the secondary market for video games and are starting to price them to market values, but I still find the occasional gem that's priced well below market value because whoever put it on the shelf didn't think to check first. We're almost always together when garage sale-ing and thrift store-ing, but I told her about this $100K Super Mario Bros sale and told her to keep an eye out for older sealed box video games, you never know what you might come across somewhere.

Garage sales are the best place to find great deals, as many people don't realize their old systems are valuable, or just want to get their kids' old games out of the house with as little fuss as possible.

This was a great read. I’m not much into collectibles, but I do have a sealed original iPhone in my safe that I figure might become a collectible someday. Problem is, I didn’t give any thought about what would happen to the battery over time.

I got good news for ya, buddy. If having the box sealed is critical to its value, the phone could have been replaced by an iPhone-sized rock at the factory, and it's value will be every bit as high.

I love how stamp collecting basically collapsed flat, with former million-doll-stamps fetching only a fraction of their value.

I collect large ugly rocks. Can I have your head when you die?

Pithy rejoinder aside, many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

You could be right, but I would think these people who want to scratch that nostalgia itch aren’t focused on buying sealed games to never open and play. I feel it’s more about preserving the legacy of this early technology, and there’s a subset of us who care deeply about that. With downloads and streaming taking over, physical media will likely become extinct at some point so these pristine copies will represent that particular era of gaming.

There's definitely a group of people (collectors?) who are interested in the nostalgia of old video games, especially the Nintendo games (because they really started home consul gaming in America), and I would argue that this is what fuels the smaller subset of sealed condition collectors, basically true for any longer lasting collection (except maybe baseball cards, which arguably were basically early 'fantasy sports'). My guess is that rare systems and Nintendo will stay at the top of this pile for collecting, with Nintendo games hitting that 'first edition wizard of oz' vibe and oddball systems having some museum like value to boost their status.

There certainly is a resurgence of retro gaming now. I can't say whether sims and emulators (official and otherwise) are helping or hurting. Certainly they bring wider access and a sense that you can have your sealed box cake and eat it (or an emulator version of it) too, and for those of us who just want to remember the game, this is great. IMHO, this has driven this specific moment's high degree of nostalgia, but may be a mixed bag for collectors - more interest, but also ultimately less need for semi-rare titles in just okay condition.

It will be interesting to see how collection fares in the age of digital content.

That is a great story and very well told. I just had an interesting few minutes trying to explain to my 9 year old why someone might pay that much money for a game they won't play. Thankfully fine art and Pokemon came to the rescue

I'd agree with the idea that this might be a good time for shifting collections- my parents recently cleared out their roof and found all my toys from the 80s. I was a very careful child, so all the transformers etc are in very good condition and boxed. I have fond memories, but I am never going to use them again- selling to collectors means that they go to someone who will value them as much as I did. Talking to the collectors it does seem that most of them are my age and want to replace collections that went in the bin, or they could never afford the first time around, but they can afford it now. It's kinda nice when someone sends me a picture of one of mine now in their display cabinet.